In the future imagined by Pinar Yanardag, a postdoctoral research associate at MIT Media Lab, AI will collaborate with humans, not replace them. This is the concept behind her project, “How to Generate (Almost) Anything,” which she created with other students from the MIT Media Lab and professionals in the Boston area. Yanardag sat down with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about this project, along with her other new creations.
Sep 21, 2019•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’ve all chosen the self-checkout stand over the human cashier, thinking it’ll take less time. But somehow, things take a terrible turn. The barcodes aren’t scanning, there’s a pop-up scolding you for not placing the product in the bagging area (though you did, of course), and an employee is coming over to fix the chaos. It would’ve taken less time to go to the cashier. Focal Systems is applying deep learning and computer vision to automate portions of retail stores in order to streamline store...
Sep 15, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast College students are many things — sleepy, overly caffeinated, stressed — but above all, they are hungry. Kiwi Campus is here to help. Co-founder and CEO of Kiwi Campus, Felipe Chávez, joined AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz to talk about Kiwi and its delivery service. Based in Berkeley, Calif., the company specializes in creating a robotic ecosystem for last mile delivery. Its solution is the Kiwibot. The small autonomous robot delivers orders seven days a week from 10 AM to 8 PM. Its coverage area...
Sep 10, 2019•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast Charter Communications is working to make customer service smarter even before an operator picks up the phone. Charter Communications, also known as Spectrum, is using AI to improve their customer service and process data more intelligently. Senior Director of Wireless Engineering Jared Ritter took a break from his presentations at GTC Santa Clara to talk to AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about Charter’s perspective on customer relations.
Sep 03, 2019•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Artificial intelligence thrives on data, the more the better. But when we’re talking about putting data in many industries, such as health care, to work, things can get very complicated, very quickly. Walter De Brouwer is CEO of Doc.ai, a Silicon Valley based company that’s building a medical research platform that can address this issue with federated learning.
Aug 18, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Imagine staring into the high-beams of an oncoming car. Now imagine trying to pick out a speck of dust in the glare of the headlights. That’s the challenge Olivier Guyon and Damien Gratadour face as they try to find the dull glint of an exoplanet — a planet orbiting a star outside our solar system — beside the bright light of its star. The pair -- Guyon is an instrument developer for Japan’s Subaru Telescope, and an astronomer at the University of Arizona; and Gratadour is an associate professor...
Aug 07, 2019•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast The words “data science” often inspire feelings of dread or confusion. But Virtualitics, an AI-based analytics platform, is bringing creativity and excitement to the field through machine learning and immersive virtualization. In our latest episode of the AI Podcast, Virtualitics Machine Learning Projects Head Aakash Indurkhya spoke with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about why VR can now be so useful.
Jul 28, 2019•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Some say style never fades, and now with the help of AI, finding one’s fashion sense is about to get a whole lot easier. Fashion ecommerce startup Stitch Fix is piecing together a seamless balance between AI-powered decision making and human judgement. We spoke with Stitch Fix Chief Algorithms Officer Brad Klingenberg about how the company is using AI to help us all dress better.
Jul 09, 2019•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast We’re all aware of the race to deliver self driving cars that will allow consumers to sit back and be chauffeured wherever they wish. But the implications of self-driving trucks might actually be bigger, in the short term. Our guest today is Chuck Price, Chief Product Officer of TuSimple, which is developing commercially ready level four fully autonomous driving solutions for the logistics industry: self-driving trucks. So let’s talk trucks.
Jul 02, 2019•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast AI is bringing convenience to your healthcare experience. Health insurance company Anthem helps patients personalize and better understand their healthcare information through AI. We spoke with Rajeev Ronanki, senior vice president and chief digital officer at Anthem, about how AI makes data "meaningful and useful," for the healthcare giant.
Jun 26, 2019•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast SAS Chief Operating Officer Oliver Schabenberger spoke with us about how organizations can use AI and related technologies.
Jun 04, 2019•17 min•Transcript available on Metacast The path to self driving vehicles is usually marked by six milestones, or levels, from level 0, or no automation, to level 5, or full autonomy. Jianxiong Xiao, CEO of of startup AutoX, has his sights set on level 4, defined by the National Highway Traffic Administration as “a car capable of performing all driving functions under certain conditions."
May 29, 2019•21 min•Transcript available on Metacast Sticky. Kind. Chronic. Reefer. Forget the dated slang. These days the word is ‘opportunity.’ The market for legal cannabis in the United States was estimated at $12 billion last year, up 30% year over year from 2017, and it’s projected to grow to $44 billion by 2020. Our guests this episode is Vincent Harkiewicz, is CEO and co-founder of Boulder, Colorado-based Grownetics, a startup that sits at the intersection of agtech, marjijuana, data analytics and artificial intelligence.
May 21, 2019•28 min•Transcript available on Metacast Tara Chklovski is CEO and founder of Iridescent, a non-profit that provides access to hands on learning opportunities to prepare underrepresented children and adults for the future of work. She’s been called everything from the “pioneer empowering the incredible tech girls of the future,” to a “CEO science superstar hero.” Tara is here to talk about a bunch of things, including the UN’s AI for Good Global Summit this May in Geneva, and the AI World Championship, part of the AI Family Challenge, ...
May 16, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast Good news: astronomers are getting new tools to let them see further, better than ever before. The bad news: they’ll soon be getting more data than humans can handle. To turn the vast quantities of data that will be pouring out of these instruments into world-changing scientific discoveries, Brant Robertson, a visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton and an associate professor of astronomy at UC Santa Cruz, is turning to AI.
May 01, 2019•22 min•Transcript available on Metacast In 2015 today's guest penned an article called "Robot Propaganda" for Wired magazine. It contained this then bold prediction: "we are likely to see versions of these bots deployed on U.S. audiences as part of the 2016 presidential election campaigns." Well we all know how that turned out. Sean Gourley, founder and CEO of Primer, joined us to talk about bots, propaganda and fake news and how they relate to the work his own company is doing in natural language understanding and generation.
Apr 21, 2019•31 min•Transcript available on Metacast Robots can do amazing things. Compare even the most advanced robots to a three-year old, however, and they can come up short. UC Berkeley Professor Pieter Abbeel has pioneered the idea that deep learning could be the key to bridging that gap: creating robots that can learn how move through the world more fluidly and naturally. We caught up with Abbeel, who is director of the Berkeley Robot Learning Lab and cofounder of Covariant AI, a Bay Area company developing AI software that makes it easy to...
Apr 11, 2019•24 min•Transcript available on Metacast UC Berkeley's Gerry Zhang talks about his work using deep learning to analyze signals from space for signs of intelligent extraterrestrial civilizations. And while we haven't found aliens, yet, the doctoral student has already made some extraordinary discoveries.
Mar 27, 2019•19 min•Transcript available on Metacast Not sure who will win the NBA playoffs? Looking for coaching when putting together your fantasy football team? Swish Analytics uses AI to help you pick winners. Corey Beaumont, co-founder and head of engineering at the startup, explains how Swish Analytics takes the same kind of mathematical models lenders use to assess whether a borrower is a good risk and applies them to the $1 trillion sports betting market.
Mar 14, 2019•26 min•Transcript available on Metacast GOAT Group helps sneaker enthusiasts get their hands on authentic Air Jordans, Yeezys and a variety of old-school kicks with the help of AI. Michael Hall, director of data at GOAT Group explains how in a conversation with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz.
Feb 26, 2019•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast You probably recognize the name Nuance from their work with speech recognition and virtual assistant technology. They’re one of the pioneers of voice recognition technology. Of course Nuance Communications has gotten into AI, but what you might not know is they’ve also gotten into using AI to chart the course of the healthcare industry and how physicians can use artificial intelligence to make people healthier and make their work better, Karen Holzberger is the vice president and general manager...
Feb 11, 2019•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast At some point in life, every man faces the same great challenge: sorting out his children's Lego pile. Thanks to GPU-driven deep learning, Francisco "Paco" Garcia is one of the few men who can say they've conquered it. Here's how.
Jan 23, 2019•30 min•Transcript available on Metacast You don't need to be an an academic or to work for a big company to get into deep learning. You can just be a guy with a NVIDIA GeForce 1080 Ti and a Generative Adversarial network. Jason Antic, who describes himself as "a software guy," began digging deep into GANS. Next thing you know: he’s created an increasingly popular tool that colors old black-and-white shots to make them look good. Interested in digging into AI for yourself? Listen and get inspired.
Jan 09, 2019•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast SoundHound made its name as music identification service. Since then, SoundHound has become much more. It's leveraged its 10 plus years in data analytics to create a voice recognition tool companies can bake into any product. Here to tell us how SoundHound has grown into a major player in voice driven Ai is SoundHoud VP of Product Marketing Mike Zagorsek.
Dec 19, 2018•29 min•Transcript available on Metacast With “Fake News” embedding itself into, well, our news, it’s become more important than ever to distinguish between content that is fake or authentic. That’s why Vagelis Papalexakis, a professor of computer science at the University of California, Riverside, developed an algorithm that detects fake news with 75 percent accuracy.
Dec 06, 2018•27 min•Transcript available on Metacast Voice recognition is one thing, creating natural sounding artificial voices is quite another. Lyrebird - a member of NVIDIA’s Inception startup program - uses deep learning to take this a step further, with a system that's able to listen to a human voices and generate speech that mimics the sound of the original, human, speaker. We spoke with Lyrebird co-founder Jose Solero about the benefits of this technology, and why he feels the need to educate the public about what's possible.
Nov 21, 2018•36 min•Transcript available on Metacast Dr. Kai-Fu Lee has been at the center of artificial intelligence for decades. dr. Lee developed the world's first speaker independent continuous speech recognition system, selected as the most important innovation of the year by BusinessWeek, and that was back in 1988. In the three decades since, Dr. Lee has led teams at Apple, Silicon Graphics, Microsoft and Google. In 2009 Dr. Lee left Google to start Sinovation Ventures, which now manages a $2 billion fund focusing on technology startups in C...
Nov 07, 2018•34 min•Transcript available on Metacast Intuit Senior Vice President and Chief Data Officer Ashok Srivastava on how the personal finance giant is using AI to help make us all smarter about our finances.
Oct 24, 2018•32 min•Transcript available on Metacast When you hear of AI and machine learning, it’s easy to think of technology companies leading the charge. Capital One is determined to change that. In a conversation with AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz, Nitzan Mekel, managing vice president of machine learning at Capital One, explained how the banking giant is integrating AI and machine learning into customer-facing applications such as fraud-monitoring and detection, call center operations and customer experience.
Oct 10, 2018•25 min•Transcript available on Metacast DOOM, of course, is foundational to 3D gaming. 3D gaming, of course, is foundational to GPUs. GPUs, of course, are foundational to deep learning, which is, now, thanks to a team of Italian researchers, two of whom we're bringing to you with this podcast, being used to make new levels for... DOOM.
Sep 17, 2018•23 min•Transcript available on Metacast 
